23 weeks

not too much difference visually, but boy do i feel bloated! i think things are moving around, up, down…making it much more difficult to breath. baby chaud is growing bigger and taking over my inside space rapidly.

rosey doesn't seem to mind!

getting ready for baby

patrick and i are going to finish the baby registry tomorrow. surely, there will be a baby backpack on the list. patrick has always wanted one. we have 2 showers in march, so we figured that we ought to be ready when the invites went out. registering for baby things is really hard. thankfully, janelle has been a big help. she has lots of hand-me-downs and lots of recent experience i can learn from.

we have a busy four months ahead of us to prepare for babychaud's arrival!

DIY Stem Cells - You know, for kids!

Everyone knows I'm a hands kind of guy that likes to prove I can build something.

Now I've got the plans for isolating our own stem cell line.

'Step 3', i.e, 'get placenta' is arguably the most challenging phase of the project, but we've got one of those on hand. Everything else is just rec-tec cookbook and ethically clean, unless the Pope has decided placentophagy is necessary.

22 weeks

yoga is good for me. as is green tea, walking and rosey & abby. oh, hot fudge sundaes too!

last friday, during a snow storm, patrick and i drove to plymouth for a hot fudge sundae. the only other person at the baskin robbins was also pregnant. however, her husband got a larger sundae than her.

First Born Fun

Pinched from a Birth Order site:

The First Born has only younger siblings. Growing up, the First Born always knows more than his or her siblings do. As an adult the First Born subconsciously continues to look at others as if they were younger siblings. Often, the First Born is surprised that others know what they know, can do what they can do and have the insights they have.

This attitude limits what First Borns can learn from others. Their first reaction to being told something is to disagree. They know something that contradicts what they are being told so they must disagree as if the other person is a younger sibling who does not know what he or she is talking about.

On the other hand, First Borns have no older siblings to limit them. This allows them to be dreamers since they have no one to bring them back to reality.

By adopting the attitude that everyone knows something he doesn't know the First Born can be receptive to others' ideas. By realizing that he is now an adult among adults rather than the older brother he can deal with others as equals.


There is something rather exciting about Baby Chaud for me in that he will be a first born/only child. I have been a first born refugee in a sea of last born children. My Father is the last of five, my Mother the last of three. Nicole the youngest of her sisters, Scott the provincial younger sibling in my subconscious. Even most of my friends throughout my life have been last born. Only in my professional career of science have I run across a majority of First Borns. So Baby Chaud will be, as far as I can tell, the first First Born with whom I will be obliged to have an intimate relationship. I can only assume he will have an ultra-critical voice inside his head that he levels at everyone, but most harshly at himself. His standards will be nigh-unattainable, his justice severe: people get what they deserve. They say First Borns generally don't get along, I'm (typically) cautious of how to police that in his formative years. Still, I have much First Born optimism about his life. Afterall, they say it's the parent of the opposite sex that has the dominant influence on a child, so Nicole's compassion and certitude will help steady those first born thoughts, much like my Mom did for me.

O Nyarlep? Ia! Nyarlep! Ia!

Halfway through my college years a rather famous video game came out called Quake. Scott and I played this game a lot, and it was also the first time I was exposed to the various monsters like Chthon and Shub-Niggurath, which were clear homages to the great science horror writer, H.P. Lovecraft. I quickly consumed his seminal work, Call of Cthulu before jumping right into the gorefest of his masterpiece, Necronomicon. I was never the same again.

Over the last decade, Cthulu and his various gallery of unspeakable horrors have entered the modern culture through a host of different venues, but now, oh ho ho ho, now, we can enjoy the unspeakable evil in cuddly plush form.

Perhaps Baby Chaud will snuggle with the master of forbidden knowledge, or stroke the Hound of Tindalos like a special friend. The Necronomicon Pillow, however, that takes the cake. The Teddy Bears are gonna have some new and interesting friends in the crib...

Ia!

leg cramps, ouch!

let's hope that more yoga will be the cure to my horrible early morning leg cramps. prior to pregnancy, i used to get these charlie horses a few times a year. since my pregnancy, i have had them 4 times. not only do i awake crying in pain, but days after my leg still is sore.

Deep Sea Nursery

Squid and other alien-esque inverterbrates are a staple of my fascinations, as I assume will be for my son, and I will saturate his world with such tentacled imagery by default of my own affectations. As a rule of thumb, most squid are thought to be deadbeat parents, rather literally, as the act of sex usually exhausts the post-copulatory creatures. Muscles turn to goo after they've expunged all their energy stores in the act of procreation, and quickly die.

At least one species has been found to be a doting mother.

The Gonatus onyx deep sea squid actually produces a double membrane sac that it funnels all the developing embryos into, and it carries this thing around constantly thousands of miles from its home in the black void of the deeps. The movies, if you care to look, are outstanding. The end result?



Awwwwwwww.

You children will be the death of me

Surprise, surprise, having kids will reduce your lifespan by a statistically significant margin.

A pair of researchers, drawing on the experience of nearly 22,000 couples in the 19th century -- has measured the "fitness cost" of human reproduction. This is the price that parents pay in their own health and longevity for the privilege of having their genes live on in future generations. The findings, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, manage to be both predictable and surprising.

Not surprisingly, women paid a bigger price than men. Older mothers were four times as likely to die in the year after having a child than their mates. Having lots of children was especially risky. A mother of 12 had five times the risk of dying prematurely as a mother of three. Even after their child-bearing years came to an end, women who had had many children died earlier than women who had had few.

The price of parenthood wasn't trivial for men, either. Despite the obvious fact that men avoided the hazards of childbirth, fathering more children meant more risk of dying before their time, too.

Essentially what we're talking about here is chronic stress, and raising another person is about as long term and intense as it gets. Of course, kids don't get out of the family relation scot-free, as it were:

Children who lost a mother before their fifth birthdays had a 78 percent higher chance of dying before they turned age 18 than children whose mothers survived. The same effect was seen -- again, less dramatically -- after the death of a father. Children who lost a father by age 5 had a 14 percent higher risk of dying in childhood.

Not the most earth-shattering data, but no one has really ever looked at this objectively before. I suspect siblings also attempt to suck years off each other's lifespan, in an evolutionary sense, but only so far as to the genetic similarity, of which most siblings share 50% of their genes; the parent-child relation is not without this scrutiny as well, but the investment relation is slightly skewed. Grandparents, of course, have the least investment in terms of resources but probably the greatest evolutionary interest as this represents the propogation of their genetic legacy, which I assume accounts for spoiling and increased adulation.

All the more reason for parents to exercise, be rich, eat plenty of antioxidants and get a dog or two: They will help buffer the leeching effect unwitting children play upon them.

20 weeks 5 days

my belly seems to have appeared quickly between week 16 and now. i am still in the "i love being pregnant" stage of pregnancy. even though it has been 5 months, the reality of this life changing event really didn't hit me until the ultrasound.

baby chaud is active before bed time. the flutters feel a lot like when a body part falls a sleep and wakes up. also, the movements are in same spot…i thought that was weird. but the ultrasound showed his little feet were right where i feel the flutters. these are such tiny movements that you can't feel on the outside until week 24ish.

Babies love Mozart

Or so I'm told.

Check it: You too can strap a stereo to your uterus. I've seen a number of devices out there ranging into the thousands where you can give the baby something to jam on. Here at 20 weeks, 5 days Baby Chaud has functioning ears and can likely pick up a wide range of noises, I would guess most prominent being Rosey's snoring, her discretion being to lap-nap so often in the Winter months.

Our musical tastes have similar origins. Nicole's tastes originate in the classic Alternative/Post-Punk/Indie Rock genre, over time she's gravitated to more of the modern Dreampop/Shoegaze type stuff. My own tastes started in Metal and were eventually crystallized in a Thrash-Funk/Industrial/Punk-Ska-Core that forms the nucleus of my personal library, to which I've later moved into things like Bossanova and DeathCountry/Psychobilly stuff. That's not to say we're that strict. You can find a very wide range of tunes in our collection from Patsy Cline to Marvin Gaye to Marilyn Manson. Granted, some music like Creed makes us want to barf. I have no real faith in the idea that Mozart has some magic/supernatural voodoo in it that raises baby IQ, but I've taken to talking to the baby on occasion, as I can get my voice closer than Mom and since I'm not sharing a circulatory system, it's to my advantage to imprint my excellence as early as possible, even if words are probably beyond his grasp. The music we choose, however, has to be getting to his ears by now.

I hope the kid likes Tom Waits.

19 weeks 5 days

what have i swallowed? my new yoga pants for my prenatal yoga class that starts next week!

carrots and peanut butter?

not my craving!

i like candy, but then again that is my craving all the time so i guess i can't call it that. patrick came home from work yesterday and decided to have a snack that piqued not only my interest but also rosey's but for 2 very different reasons. i thought, how gross! rosey sat like a good dog in hopes of snagging a piece of her favorite treat. (at least they are her favorites independent of one another.) patrick is really a daddy-to-be.

I Choo-Choo-Choose you

Check out this nifty article about math, trains and kids. But mostly math, little trains and almost no kids. Essentially, if you add a few forked pieces to a train track, the number of possible patterns begins to balloon arithmatically.

As a child, Scott and I regularly combined our HO scale train set with a huge plastic dinosaur playset we had. The train would routinely zip up the hill past the coal bins, through the Jurassic caves, barrel over the T Rex before usually derailing and hitting the Pizza Hut. I wouldnt' say it was the reason we both can do calculus today but WHO KNOWS???